VLVL PR3 and "the Movement"

[Terrance]

VL focuses on  a specific time period (1967-70) in the movement. It is
also focused on the Traveling Organizers of SDS (Frenesi's Film Crew)
and two Universities (Berkeley and Columbia, Berkeley and College of the
Surf). The focus of the novel is not intended to imply that one
organization deserves credit for all of the youthful protest
activity--violent or non violent--occuring in the years under
consideration or that Berkeley and Columbia were the beating hearts of
youthful protest. SDS was most prominent in major campus disorder, but
lots of disorders occurred when and where SDS-ers were not present. 

VL is about work. As we view the film reel after reel we see Frenesi out
with her camera filming the repression of farm workers who are trying to
organize in 1967. The brother of the murdered President is in that
valley meeting with one of America's greatest labor figures, a person
not as well known as Martin Luther King only because America has a black
and white memory. Frenesi is the  daughter and granddaughter of labor
organizers. Her idea of one big revolution that will take everyone in, 
is IWW. But her dream is of the people marching into the blade of the
police must give us pause. What has happened to Frenesi? She has a spark
of gnostic light in her eyes when she meets her partner, DL. 

DL is not the daughter of the Left, but the daughter of the military,
the police, a marriage of domestic and foreign abuse. She wants to kick
The Man's ass. She might have been a great soldier for Cuba, but she's
too restless. An angry army brat, she has a personal score to settle
with the Old Man. 

In College of the Surf  period that Pynchon focuses on in VL, SDS began
building an alliance of workers and students. Off-camous activism in the
spring of 1969 was illustrated by the appearance of college students on
picketlines of striking workers--action not confined to those SDS
members favoring the Progressive Party line of building aworker-student
alliance.  The new "Revolutionary Youth Movement" directed SDS's
attention toward non-student groups. Students from NYC and NJ joined
workers in a wildcat strike at Ford in Mahwah, NJ, April 1969. Mark
Rudd, and I'm quite convinced that the College of the Surf is a
fictionalized Columbia set in Dick Nixon's backyard (and we should not
neglect the role of the surfers and how their culture was co-opted),
Rudd, of Columbia, and member of the Black Panther Party were among
those manning the picket lines (later, Frenesi and Flash will cross a
picket line at the airport) which succeeded in closing the Ford Plant
for two nights. SDS was there to help improve the lives of black workers
in the Plant and in the Union. Same sort of thing was going on in places
like Michigan, where white workers engaged in a  wildcat strike were
joined buy students from University of Michigan. On campus too, labor
was an issue. Student sit-ins at the University of Chicago defending a
Marxist professor, same thing at Stanford. 

But the violence, the vandalism, the disruption of classes, and so on
...  also intensified. The stuff we here on this list all the time,
"Confrontation" Politics and Militant Anti-Militarization, increase and
I think Pynchon's focus on these and this period serves to denounce
these practices and show the damage they caused, but also to expose the
inherent flaws of floundering polarization policies, how alliances are
made and broken, not only at the macro level, Russia and the USA of
pre-post W.W.II in GR, but at the micro or worker level. How, for
example, the BPP's strain with labor and eventually with SDS,
contributed to the failure of the workers and the kids to get together. 

Sorry this is more rambled and rough ...ruff ruff ruffer than my usual
sandpaper and glue job ...    very busy. 

T